I saw a Google message the other day that made me want to look into the word pound.

Google had confused some people by giving some directions for a certain procedure that included instructions to “press the pound key.” By this Google had intended people to push the button with that little cross-hatched symbol on it, also known as the hash mark or the octothorp but evidently lots of people didn’t know this and thought pound meant the symbol for British money.

So that gives me two stories to tell:

• Why pounds are both weight and money; and
• how come the name of that little cross-hatch symbol doesn’t have a universally recognized name.

The word pound shows up as early as there is English so it came from a Germanic source. In pre-English Germanic languages a pound was a unit of weight although for the longest time it represented wildly different weights in different places, and even different weights for different things in the same place. A pound of bread didn’t necessarily weigh the same as a pound of cheese even in the same town.

This Germanic word evolved out of an Indo-European root that also made its way into Latin. Pondo was a Latin word that meant “by weight” and so this reinforced the Germanic word in English and legitimized its application to what in Latin was called libra and was also a unit of weight. So in Latin libra pondo meant a “pound of weight” or a “pound by weight.”

Since ancient times money was minted in precious metals and so at first a pound sterling was actually a pound of silver.

This explains why French money was at one time counted in livre and Italian money in lira. This also explains why the monetary symbol pound is a stylized L £ and the abbreviation for a pound of weight is lb.

But at some point in the first half of the twentieth century people in America started to use two lines horizontally crossing two lines vertically # instead of the abbreviation lb. The first citation for this is from 1923 in a typewriting textbook. This symbol is also sometimes called a number sign.

But it seems that even if it made it into print in 1923 not everyone recognized it because we have a 1974 citation calling it an octothorp and a 1984 citation calling it the hash symbol.

I’ll make short work of the hash symbol by telling you that lexicographers suspect this was a popular alteration of the word hatch which makes sense since the thing looks like a cross hatching.

It’s the word octothorp that merits a little more time. Even though Americans had been calling this thing the pound sign or the number sign for 50 years Bell Labs was having none of it. So in 1974 the magazine Telephony announced that this symbol

“at long last had a name: octothorp.”

Evidently a guy named Don Macpherson had pondered long and hard on this question back in the 1960s and decided that because there were eight little line-ends sticking out of the symbol it had to be called something that included octo; octo meaning “eight” like an octopus has eight legs. But octo wasn’t enough; there had to be more to the name than that.

Evidently Macpherson was quite involved in a campaign surrounding an athlete named Jim Thorpe and figured adding Jim Thorpe’s name to octo would be a memorable way to differentiate the word.

Jim Thorpe was a double gold Olympic medal winner who had the misfortune to compete during a time when the amateur status of Olympic athletes was taken more seriously than it is today. Thorpe was found to have played minor league baseball—horror of horrors—for money, and so had is Olympic medals taken away.

Those were the 1912 Olympics. My grandfather George was also a double gold medal winner in those Olympics. He also had his medals taken away, but by thieves out of a display case at the Montreal Amateur Athletics Association.

It’s enough to make you want to pound something.

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